Were you faced
with an IRS audit and felt that the agent took advantage of you? In most instances,
the IRS comes to their own conclusions and does not consider the reality of the
taxpayer's issues. This results in an outcome that you are not pleased with. The IRS' primary concern lies in collecting your money and assets, regardless of the fact that you have a family to take care of or bills that you
are uanble to pay. All taxpayers dread facing an audit conducted by the IRS.
The average taxpayer
does not know that they can actually appeal the final results of an IRS audit. If
in fact you do not agree with the outcome of the audit, you can submit a written
formal protest within 30 days to negotiate with the IRS and possibly lower the amount
of your tax debt. This procedure is not to be done on your own due to the fact that
it is far too complicated. You must obtain a tax professional to handle this matter
for you.
Most audit appeals
are used to the taxpayer's advantage and 80% of audit appeals are successful to some
extent. Submitting the formal protest and filing the appeal not only holds the IRS
off your case for a few months, but it may also help minimize the liabilities you
have with the IRS. This may be a huge relief off of your shoulders.
All appeals are
handled by a different division within the IRS, which is known as the Appeals office, meaning that once you file the appeal, you most likely will not have to deal with
the IRS agent who audited you in the first place; you will usually deal with the
appeals officer only. This may be a benefit to the taxpayer since the appeals
officer is not as familiar with your case as the agent who audited you is. An appeals officer in some cases may be more considerate than your original
IRS field agent was.
As stated above, you will require professional assistance in appealing an audit. Since this is a
touchy procedure you must choose who you want to represent you wisely. We have seen
instances where a taxpayer hires a CPA to handle their IRS audit issues for them.
The result of this is not highly successful simply because a CPA does not know all
the rules and regulations of the IRS. While CPA's are knowledgable to some extent, they are not tax professionals. They are not as experienced as tax attorneys and
Enrolled Agents when it comes to the intimate details of the IRS. You must hire somebody
who deals only with resolving taxpayers IRS issues on a daily basis.
Included, you will
find links to a case where one of our clients hired a CPA to handle his audit and
the IRS agent took full advantage of the situation. Since the CPA did not know the
correct guidelines on how to approach the IRS, it made the taxpayer's situation far
more complicated. The client then called for our help and as you can see, we confronted
the IRS agent and rectified the situation on behalf of the taxpayer. We've entered
blanks in order to protect the indentity of the client.
